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December 13, 2009

The Cease and Desist Letter Saga

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Well, it is over. My best performing domain has been taken from me due to trademark issues.
Just a recap if you don’t feel like reading my first post on receiving a cease and desist letter.

Last summer, my finance website started to take off. I was showing up on the first 3 pages of Google search, and the income was going up along with the page views.

Then the letter came. Apparently, two of the words in my domain were trademarked, and the attorney wanted me to hand over the domain.

I argued, I fought, I asked for concessions, but in the end I handed the domain over. In return, I got nothing.

I might have been able to fight it, but I felt my chances for success were low, and I didn’t want to spend the time or the money. In the end, I moved my blog to a better domain, Money, Debt and Taxes, and now I will just do what I did before to bring it up in the search rankings and build the traffic.

As a result of this I am now much more careful in choosing my domains. I am looking to see if there is any chance that they might be trademarked. I don’t want to lose that much hard work ever again!

July 2, 2008

How Not To Lose (Too Many) Visitors When You Move Your Site – Part 3

In this final installment, let’s see a few more things that you can do in order to redirect your current audience to a new site address. All of them are related to your site strategy — you have one, right? If you don’t, it’s time to think about it.

Strategic decisions to prevent loss of visitors

1. Use a paid domain. Unlike webhosting, that would be a yearly expense. So, the impact on your budget would be minimal. Besides, many free webhosts allow the use of paid domains. Therefore, register one right from the start if you’re still going to build your website and you prefer to initially have it hosted for free. If your site is already up and running, buy a domain for it as soon as possible and then just announce the new official address. If you’re about to move your site but still haven’t bought a domain, see if you can delay the move for one or two months. Purchase the domain, announce it and give your visitors some time to bookmark it and get used to it while they gradually forget the old free address. Then you’ll be able to move safely.

In any case, keep in mind that you’ll never go wrong when you register your own domain. This is the very best thing you can do to make sure that you won’t lose any visitors, no matter how many times you move your site or blog.

2. Contact your most faithful visitors. If you’re the type who mostly ignores visitors’ emails and comments, I urge you to change your behaviour — unless you don’t want to succeed as a webmaster. Remember that word of muth still works. So, when you move your blog or site, take the time to contact your most loyal visitors, tell them about the new URL and politely ask them to help you spread the word about it. Don’t forget to offer to return the favour when they need; it’s only fair.

3. Don’t close the old site. I entered the meta-blogging universe via WordPress.com. So, yes, my blog was hosted for free — and still is. Although nowadays I use paid webhosting and domains, I’ve never closed that old blog. I rarely update it, but it’s still there, with all its content, subscribers and backlinks. I knew I could move its content to any of my privately hosted blogs, but I chose to continue from where I were at, instead of starting everything again. When I released my new blogging projects, I used that blog to promote them. And whenever I start a new web project, I do the same. Due to this positive experience, it’s obvious that I recommend you do it too.

Of course it won’t always be possible. If your free webhost closes its doors, or if it changes its rules and you can’t comply to the new policies, you won’t be able to follow my suggestion. But if that’s not the case, I advise you to leverage your current site instead of simply killing it in favour of a newer one.

A final piece of advice: don’t feel miserable if you lose part of your audience after switching to another host. Everyone is subject to it. Moreover, the time wasted in whining would be much better spent in promotion and rebuilding.

Now it’s your turn: tell us if you ever had to move a blog or site to a new webhost and what you’ve done to redirect your visitors to the new URL. The comment form is there for you.

You can also subscribe to our blog to make sure that you’ll never miss our future tip series.

Karen Zara has been involved in Internet-based projects since 2002. One of them is Abaminds, a blog for content producers that you can visit by clicking here.

June 4, 2008

How Not to Lose (Too Many) Visitors When You Move Your Site – Part 2

In the first part of this new series I wrote about three ways to redirect visitors to a new site. Today I’ll show you that there are also off-site ways to guide your audience towards another destination.

Using various tools to keep in touch with your visitors

1. Update newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with your visitors. If you usually send email alerts to let them know about fresh site content, it’s obvious that you may as well send out a special alert informing everyone about your site’s new address. In case you still haven’t set up an update newsletter, I strongly recommend that you start working on it right now.

2. Forums are great for community-building purposes and also to make a site stickier. Depending on how successful a forum is, it may become more popular than the site it originated from. If you currently use a free webhost for your site or blog, make sure to host your forum on a third party (even if it’s a free one too). Never have both your site and forum hosted by the same free webhosting company. This way, if you need to move your site for reasons that are beyond your control (e. g., your site’s webhost suddenly goes out of business), you’ll still be able to use your forum to communicate with your visitors and let them know about the changes.

3. The same principle can be applied if you keep a site and a blog simultaneously. Do not host both of them on the same free webhosting provider, even if this recommendation appears to be less practical. Use your blog to inform your visitors about your site’s new address and vice-versa.

4. Don’t forget about the sites, forums and blogs that you know your visitors usually read. Update your signatures, leave comments linking to your new URL, sign guestbooks when available… But please, don’t go overboard with those. You don’t want to become a spammer, do you? If you do, all you will manage is to lose your visitors for good.

Can you think of other ways to leverage online tools and communities to direct a site’s visitors to its new address? Feel free to share your tips by leaving your comments on this post.

Did you think I was done with this series? Think again! I want to help you retain and/or recover as many visitors as possible. So I’m going to offer some additional suggestions in my next article. Get it as soon as it’s published by subscribing to our blog.

Karen Zara has been involved in Internet-based projects since 2002. One of them is Abaminds, a blog for content producers that you can visit by clicking here.